The ongoing software adventures of Julian Biddle

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Dynamo Db can be very useful in AWS scripting for persisting variable values.

It seems the most common way of doing this is to use the “aws” cli tool. For Powershell users there isn’t an equivalent commandlet, so I see alot of examples calling the aws commandline tool from within Powershell.

For Powershell people there must be a better way, and that way is to call the AWS SDK directly!

Here’s an example that updates a simple table with a “Name” (key) and “Value” columns. I’ve encapsulated this in a pair of functions of utility.

File sizes are getting larger (eg media files such as video) and increasingly web applications must be able to progressively go beyond the simple file input field.

Since the HTML5 spec supported the file api it is now possible to slice up very large files and send these progressively.

The FineUploader javascript library allows this to be done in a nice way. Although the clientside example is complete, currently the MVC serverside example does not support file chunking. (Although the Java example does)

Here’s an example I’ve created, based on the original that does.

I know that it would be better to update github (and perhaps I will) but for the time being It’s quicker to present it here. I hope it helps someone and you are welcome to integrate it with FineUploaders example yourself.

Variable names, filenames and other technical names. Hungarian notion, abbreviations, verbosity, camel case and mixed case. How many of my projects have used mixtures of these conventions? How often do I forget what abbrev I usd????

?!It_never_ends!?

no-longer

I-AM-SICK-OF-IT!

_this_has_to_stop

<rant>It is time to do away with inconsistency forever. </rant>

I am happy to comply with the conventions of a language (eg in .net mixed case is used for public attributes and properties whereas camel case is used for parameters) or the conventions of an existing project, but if there isn’t any, MyNamingConventionManifesto comes into play.

The decisions are around:

CASE (Upper, Lower, Mixed or Camel Case)

DELIMITER (None, Minus, Underscore or Space)

PREFIX

SUFFIX

So, I hereby declare that my naming convention will not use prefixes or suffixes, neither will it use delimiters. In short, this is:

When starting an Amazon EC2 instance, you can pass something called “user metadata”. This can be a file or values. These values are not stored in an environmental variable or file on the new instance, but can instead be retrieved by doing a HTTP Get to a “special” IP address to retrieve those values.

There’s not alot of recent “action” around AOP in the Javascript space (Google Search). I suspect that either some of it’s functionality is automatically part of jQuery or that the Javascript world isn’t mature enough yet to care much. Perhaps it’s the former.

Over the past few days I’ve had a marvelous time implementing the MVVM pattern in Javascript. I’m discovering all my favourite technologies are there, such as object databases (Lawnchair), binding (Knockout) and much more. I hope to be blogging more about some of these soon.